


Bleeding Platinum

by CrimsonFootsteps



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: AIs and androids and replicants oh my, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Artificial AI Courier, M/M, Shotgunning, Violence, attempted murder by shotgunning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-27 05:20:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17760545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrimsonFootsteps/pseuds/CrimsonFootsteps
Summary: ARC-6, a HOUSE-created artificial human courier, has been implanted with the Platinum Chip, a device that will help ensure HOUSE controls all of Vegas, and most of the world beyond it as well.  Betrayed by one of Mr. House's closest allies, and one of Six's closest friends, ARC-6 drags himself from the grave seeking out the most powerful item in the city...A dark, violent, cyberpunk FNV AU with lots of queer content.  Tags, rating and potential pairings will be edited per chapter.





	Bleeding Platinum

Distorted code spun, open-ended, flaws bursting through his skull. Processes that had previously always worked perfectly attempted to take in his surroundings, to duplicate vision and sound and smell, and this time failed, his thoughts and senses bolted through with confused and broken sequences of useless text, auditory and visual receptors disturbed by error warnings and by sunbursts of distracting pain.

The Khans were not known for their tech savvy, but there was something to be said for the direct method. Striking a technological device hard enough would usually render it inoperable. ARC-6 blinked through a glittering sea of damaged files, his system disoriented while it desperately attempted to assess and fix the damage, even as something deep inside him settled, icy and cold, with the sick and heavy certainty that he would not make it out of this alive. Hulking, armed figures surrounded him. He was on his knees; his limbs would not respond to increasingly desperate commands to act. Worst of all, there was something wrong inside his system, some glaring hole full of chaotic emptiness, as if something important had simply been wrenched out...

 _The Platinum Chip,_ he realized, as he shook himself into some semblance of thought, as he straightened his back into some approximation of his usual aplomb. He realized, because he could see it shimmering its vast, pallid power, silver sharp and obvious behind the irises of Benny's cold brown eyes.

_Benny._

The last pathetic hope Six had of surviving this encounter, if not whole, than in some semblance of preserved self, died when he looked up at the head of the Chairmen, smiling calm triumph, posture as smooth and graceful as if he were eyeing the dance floor for a potential partner. Benny wore his trademark black and white checkered peacoat, numerous plug-ins and needle prongs sewn into the silver lace that peeked out from the coat. Leather clung to his lean legs, his boots had blocky Cuban heels, and his dark brown hair swept back from the planes of his handsome face and poured down across the coat to his waist like a headdress of feathers. The familiar calm, elegant gesture of one hand brought a cigarette to his lips, then he tossed the drained filter to the ground and crushed it firmly under one boot, withdrawing something else from his cigarette case next. Something the same general size and shape of a cigarette. Something pure white except for the harsh stamp of a six-letter code.

His slow, easy drawl didn't change, as he flipped the device around his fingers. He almost sounded sympathetic when he spoke, but Benny had always been good at sounding like whatever he wanted to sound like. Sympathetic, commanding, confident, loyal...

"Real shame you got caught up in this, kid. From where you're kneeling, it must seem like a fourteen-carat streak of bad luck."

Then he took a drag from whatever he had between his lips, slow like it was a vape pen. But it wasn't. Six could see the delicate traceries of blue and silver shimmer over the Chairman's lips. He couldn't move, could not do any thing but shake his head wildly. **Don't don't don't no not like that---**

But all he could manage was a muffled cry before one of Benny's deceptively strong hands grabbed the base of his head, and soft lips pressed to his. Benny's tongue forced his mouth open and Benny breathed a cloud of poison into him, nanites like piranhas tearing everything he was into strips of confusion and agony. Twitching helplessly, dying in this parody of a kiss, Six barely registered the last, casual words that his betrayer left as an epitaph:

"Truth is, game was rigged from the start."

*

He never thought he'd see light again. Not, at least, with some meaning to the 'he' behind that awareness, some semblance of the Six identity. It still felt gutted, shaky, burned through with massive holes and glitches. He tested his motor control and jolted awkwardly up.

"Easy, now," said a gentle voice. Six blinked into the face of a man who seemed free of too many implants, a simple man in a simple room, with a care-worn face and calm eyes. He gentled at the words, and was careful as he swung first one leg, then the next, over the edge of the narrow cot he had been lying in.

"I'm surprised you're awake. I'm a doctor, but I'm not much of a cyberneticist. Whatever's left of you inside your noggin is probably due to old Victor's quick thinking."

The old man looked nervous for a moment, eyes darting to Six as though he were a wolf. "You are... thinking clearly, right? You can... tell me your name?"

Six was thinking, was processing information and experience, but it remained to be seen if he could speak. He licked his lips, a small involuntary tic, and then attempted, "You know I'm a--" The 'cyberneticist' comment could not be taken any other way. Six mentally shuddered at the state he must have been in if the doctor could tell.

"Artificial, yeah," the doctor said, and nodded. "Don't worry, I won't tell nobody. Actually, maybe you ought to check yourself in the mirror. Make sure I stitched everything up right and proper." He kept one wary eye on Six as he reached to the table beside him for a mirror, and handed it over.

Six took himself in: smooth golden brown skin, slightly tilted almond shaped eyes (pale green, like a cat's), bare chest, neck and arms glittering with tattoos. His hair looked odd flat and free of gel. The haircut was meant to be spiked and feathered. Without the gel, ribbons of fine silver hair fell over his forehead and ears, giving him a disturbing resemblance to a wet kitten.

"Thank you," he said, and handed the mirror back. "My designation is HOUSE ARC-6, but my friends call me Raiden."

The doctor blinked and looked him over, then said, "Raiden. Not what I'd have chosen for you, but if it's your name, it's your name."

Six laughed. "I never said it was my name, Doc. I said it was what my friends called me." Truth be told, he had never thought of himself as anything other than his numeral designation. But it made people- genetic humans,- somewhat uncomfortable to be reminded that they were talking to someone who wasn't born, was never a child, who was a complex conglomeration of code and interface, self-teaching, constantly learning, but not relegated to consoles or small faceless bots like other AIs. They wanted a human name to give to a human face, and someone had come up with Raiden. That had been long ago, longer than Six had the energy to access, or maybe who it had been had been among the many files that this 'Victor' couldn't fix. Six could tell, even before his self-diagnostic finished, that there were plenty of those. His brain was in ribbons. He felt winded, and run to ground, like an animal. He didn't even know where he was. But he remembered what had happened, and he knew what he had to do.

Benny couldn't be permitted to keep the Platinum Chip. _Benny._ He couldn't think of Benny, of that last glimpse upward at him, pristine and deadly, of that last bruising, murderous kiss, without pain exploding through his skull, barely restored systems fighting the last biting trail of the anti-AI nanite cloud.

"Judas," he whispered, "must you betray me with a kiss?"

The doctor rose, uncomfortable by the non-sequiter. "You've been through a lot," he said, not unkindly. "I'll just leave you to... sort through it all. When you're ready, I'll be waiting in the main room."

Six blinked, and then raised a hand in weary acknowledgment. He wanted to be gracious, to be charming, to soothe the obvious fear in this kind old man. But he didn't feel gracious and he didn't feel charming. He felt like something that one ought rightly to fear.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and forced away the image of the Platinum Chip, shimmering chrome over the dark brown of Benny's pretty, pitiless shark's eyes. He forced down the bile and the fury and turned it over and over, polishing it until he felt like there was something, anything, he could do with it. Then he drew himself to his feet, barely shaking.

The first thing was to thank the doctor. The second was to find this Victor, and discover what he knew, what he was, that he could fix a CAINXB nanite strip filter on a, Six had to admit, somewhat old-fashioned second-gen artificial brain.

*

The Doctor- Doc Mitchell- was as kind as Six expected.

Victor was not helpful and not forthcoming. The AI was not a sort Six had encountered before, though it claimed it was cousin to the Vegas Strip Securitrons. The dialogue from an old western flashed across the screen in its bulbous, somewhat scuffed probe exterior, honeyed words and platitudes that Six were certain were meant to distract from the questions it didn't answer. It didn't remember when it had come here, or why. It didn't know why it had thought to look for Six where Benny and the Khans had left him. It had pulled advanced, almost too advanced, anti-virus nanites and recovery software from the cloud, here, in _Goodsprings_ , a community so low on tech power that Six barely remembered it existed until he heard the name.

All this, without claiming a connection to HOUSE or the NCR or any other faction with access to major tech resources.

Victor's honeyed drawl was hiding something. It had an agenda, or whoever directed its movements had one, and that agenda did not include sharing the information with Six. He left the conversation tired and frustrated, his burgeoning gratitude for being saved trickling away drop by drop under the other AI's stubborn facade of ignorance.

At last Six simply let it go. He bought a weapon and ammo, and gel for his hair, from a small store that talked him into an armored leather coat. Then, asking around the saloon, where he sat the bartender down to gently probe at her radio implant around a fresh bruise and fix the device with a few careful taps of her antique cybernetic tools, he heard that Benny and the men he was traveling with had left toward Vegas in the direction of Novac.

They didn't have any working transports in Goodsprings, so Six trudged off on foot till he found a hulk by the side of the old defunct Grand Highway, heading toward an NCR base. He hacked it easily, but couldn't fuel it with solar power, due to a cracked receptor that would not be easy to replace. Cursing, he dragged the heavy bulk over squealing highway to a nearby pit stop. He hated using processed fuel. It smelled foul, it did not last long, and the abandoned fuel depots were nearly always full of thieves, murderers, fiends and other anarchists. Forgotten humans crouched in a forgotten resource.

Six kept his eye out as he found a siphon that still functioned. Dragging an air-car over plasteel and concrete was neither easy nor quiet. He kept his cursing mental in hopes that he would not have attracted attention, quickly opening the fuel port and slipping in the hose, but--

 _A flash of shadow in the corner of his eye._ He whirled, snapped his hand up, and felt his fist close around the slimy stinger tongue of a Scorpion.

The venomous tip was less than a foot away from his face. The Scorpion had been, perhaps, meant to look human on the surface, but it did not. The eyes weren't right. The flesh was lax and the color of old, separated chowder. Fury snarled in its eyes the moment it recovered from Six's fast response, and another stinger unfurled from the loose hoodie that covered its abdomen, just as it lunged forward to bite at Six's hand with its metal teeth.

Six used his hand-hold on its tongue for all he could. He gritted his teeth and swung the Scorpion against and over the convertible hull of the air-car. Fluid burst free as the stinger tongue ripped half-way off, spurting silver and crimson over Six's sleeve and smelling like stale lard and decay. He managed to block the larger, more deadly tail with his forearm, but it reared back, and he didn't trust the armored coat to do much good. He ripped at the tongue again, trying to either pull it free or smash the Scorpion's head against the metal side of the air-car, fumbling wrong-handed for the gun he'd bought and barely managing to skim it out of its holster.

Behind him he heard a blood-curdling shriek that told him that the Scorpion wasn't alone.

Ice washed over him. His jaw clenched too hard to curse. His off hand fumbled on the trigger, wasting a bullet through the bleached leather seats that had once been a shade of green, before he managed to blow off the tip of the Scorpion's tail and put another, final bullet in its brain. He whirled to face the other one... which was two other ones. His stupid, thoughtless swing had thrown the first Scorpion into the driver's seat.

They hunted in packs. He knew they hunted in packs. They had been designed to hunt in packs, just as he'd been designed to hide in plain sight. The muzzle of his weapon darted from one to another as they closed in. He could not take them both with the small amount of bullets he'd purchased. He fired twice, hitting glancing blows on both to slow them down. Then he swept into the air-car, directly into the lap of the dead, bleeding, insane AI war-machine he'd killed there.

He winced as he glanced at the fuel gauge but had no time for niceties. A long vicious tail snapped toward him. He ducked and fired again, blindly, as he keyed into the driving mechanism. Not much fuel, and probably less when the hose ripped out, but maybe he could close the port once he was properly ahead of the Scorpions. They could run. He'd need all the speed the air-car could give him, and he didn't have time to push the dead one out from under him.

The car's interface exploded into his mind, becoming a part of his body, an extension of his will. He ignored the old internalized warnings against speeding as he forced it to its highest speed, the shriek of the hose's nozzle practically deafening him, the old defunct highway a blinding bridge of chaotic light.

The fuel port was forgotten. The gun in his hand was forgotten. Staying alive at this speed, dodging the wreckage, was all he could manage. Dimly, he became aware that the Scorpions were no longer behind him. In fact, the old line was far behind him as well. Before him, the glittering tower of Nipton Corporation, blood-red, inviting. There, there would be fuel. There, healing tech for his scattered thoughts. There... broken glass.

And in those broken windows, were those..?

Six stopped his suicide run and stared up at the skyscraper. Bodies, glittering bodies, hung in midair behind the shattered window facades. A pitted, burned AI drone smoked in front. Wild-eyed, a naked man dashed toward Six's vehicle.

"I won!" he shouted. "I- I- I- I WON!"

Six considered speaking to him, and considered shooting him in the face. But Six was exhausted, sitting on a dead Scorpion, and had, if he had managed to count correctly in the mess, only two bullets left. He didn't feel like talking to the man, even if he were only a hapless victim. He didn't feel like wasting a bullet on the man, even if he were responsible. He stared with narrowed eyes at Nipton Tower.

This was definitely bad news. But he didn't have the fuel to get to Novac, and a few dead bodies didn't mean the cloud was down here, or that scavenging couldn't get him farther toward where he was going, if he was careful. He climbed out of the air-car and headed through the shattered glass doors into Nipton's lobby: blood-stained, burning. The advertisements for the entertainments available tripped over themselves, damaged, offering Six sweet blond virgin twins in one second and a brutal hammering from a tattooed giant in the next, cutting out in between words. The champagne fountain spurted fizzy, rust-colored liquor slick across the floor.

 _Mr. Fox,_ the broken advertisements chirped desperately, _take a drag off the finest-- tiny giraffes-- sex under the stars with one of our-- discounts for your service, soldier boy--_

It would have been funny, if it wasn't so ridiculously eerie.

Clearly, nothing was working on this floor, but closer to the main hub, either in the basement or near the roof, there was still a chance. Six steeled himself, because while the elevator seemed operational, the light inside was blinking in a way that he had to shut off some human responses not to find nauseating. He tried down first, but there was nothing there but blood and wreckage.

Up he went, up, up. The elevator doors opened.

Six resisted the urge to close the doors.

In crucifixion poses, at least twenty men and women hung from spitting, hair electrical ropes along the edges of the hall. The air smelled of chemicals, of burned flesh. Of human waste and fear. He crept forward, drawn by the gleaming, untouched lights of the consoles behind him, and flinched at a sudden sound. Seven men walked into the dim, spitting light. Seven men in the red and black tactical armor of the Legion, free of implants or plugs or even tattoos, but skin shining with silver anti-AI nanites, which made the tips of some of their fingers or the whites of some of their eyes shimmer.

Their leader was a man of average height and build, who glowed more than the others. His blue eyes were cybernetic, Legion or not. They stared at Six with a coldness that belied the simple, expressionless face. Around him, the hologram of a snarling red wolf flickered off and on. First the wrinkled muzzle and yellowed, threatening teeth, then the even more threatening eyes.

"Don't worry," said the big bad wolf, not smiling. "I won't lash you to a cross like the rest of these degenerates. You are going to be of use to me."

"I am?" Six said carefully, checking the exits and counting the number of bullets again.

"Yes," said the Legionnaire, drawing closer. "Much use. Come, let's talk in the conference room."

His soft, silvery, sweet voice was pleasant enough to send chills down Six's spine. He'd never before seen the Legion use an AI, but there was no other explanation for the shifting, snarling hologram or the perfect control this man seemed to have over the Nipton cloud. _Damnation_ , he was better than Six himself. _Newer_.

Six memorized the planes of the symmetrical face (no evident nationality), the glittering white hair (so much like his own, but with a slight wave), the blank vague movement and the total lack of affect. He thought the Legion AI was third gen at least, but crippled, as if the Legion had ripped out at least half of its personality algorhythms.

He swallowed. That made him uncomfortable, but it also meant he might have enough of an edge to listen to what the man had to say in private. A flash of Benny's kiss made him pause, hand flat on the wall, but he followed into the conference room.

"Who are you?" he managed.

"Vulpes Inculta," said the AI, and he folded himself gently into a chair around a long table, hands clasped like any businessman, eyes glassy flat. The red wolf that flickered around him disappeared, but a pure silver fox curled on the table before him, cast Six a disdainful glance, and then disappeared. The Legionnaire regarded him.

Six swallowed, and took a seat. "I need to plug in. Is it alright, while we...?"

Vulpes' eyes flashed, but his lips twitched in some approximation of something welcoming, and he said, "Certainly." He seemed entirely tense as he focused, and the shimmering currents of the cloud wrapped around him, then darkened and opened, so that Six could plug in to it. It felt amazing. Six sighed, as knowledge of the world, its' events, tech healing energy, and a deep connection to all that was Nipton poured into him.

Not that all that was Nipton was pleasant. Six didn't have a problem with anything consensual, but there was some genetic engineering and a few of the prostitution rooms that he had to staunchly block off while he blinked himself back into awareness for his conversation with Vulpes Inculta. "So why do I get to live?" he said.

Vulpes Inculta smiled, tilted his head, and explained it to him.

**Author's Note:**

> The Chairmen, and especially Benny, owe a good deal to Top Dollar in the movie the Crow. Did you know Vulpes Inculta has Science as his third tag skill? And it's 100 with all the extra content, even though he never uses it? That's why he is a Legion AI, despite the hypocrisy of such a being existing.


End file.
